Author Archives: j.xie3

An Analysis of a Poem Extracted from FIRE

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It is told from the beginning of this magazine that FIRE is the Negro Quarterly that was born during a young Negros’ rap hangout. Led by Langston, FIRE is devoted to young Negro artists. Therefore, the poem extracted from FIRE, From the Dark Tower by Countee Cullen, becomes the voice made by Negro artist with the purpose to speak up for Negro people.

It is made obvious due to the background information given about the magazine that this is a poem talking about race. However, the poem wisely uses metaphors and details of African Americans’ characteristics to deliver the message that it is about race talk. For example, the phrases about color are directly mentioned in the poem: white stars, being dark, and dark tower. Furthermore, Cullen features African Americans’, more precisely for its written back during a time in which white people and African Americans had conflict, Cullen features slaves’ life by saying: “Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute.” It is a tradition that after a harvest, the slaves of African descent would get together and play their music where the flute that makes mellow sound is a common instrument to use.

This poem also sheds light on the suppression and negative effect on African American during the conflicts with white people. Starting from the first line, “we shall not always plant while others reap”, Cullen uses this symbolism tells the unfair treatment received by slaves which are that they are the providers of labor while white people are just rip off the result fruits of their labor.

Hope, is another voice I hear by reading this poem. “We are not made eternally to weep.” Eternally means permanently, lasting forever. Through this lie, Cullen is saying that African Americans are suffering, but it is not what they are born to be doing. Cullen denies the inferiority placed on Africans and African descents by white people, from which I drew a sense of hope—at least someone sees through the justice and knows what they are meant to be even if they don’t seem to be so now. “And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.” It sounds like a slogan talking to white people, Cullen is asking those who exploit Africans to wait and see the better result coming after their hope—their next generation.

A Grieve Mother, A Lonely Soilder

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She is a mother, and her heart

   Is breaking in despair.

It has kept me hunted from the very beginning. If the shrieks piercing through the air are quite understandable because a mother undertakes a great deal of effort and pains to give birth to her baby, I lost my track when the mother “is a mother paled with fear”. Isn’t giving a birth to a human being and watching him growing up day by day one of the greatest happiness that mothers can ever ask? Yes, and no. She is a mother. She is a slave.

The poem deeply depicts the storm of agony that a slave mother is suffering when giving a birth. It is not that pain deriving from parturition, it is because she clearly understands that she does not have the ability to protect her baby. She knows that her baby, made of her flesh and bones, will be torn apart from her by these cruel people, and his life will be doomed to be a repentance of her tortuous path. Therefore, her bitter shrieks “rose” into the wild sky, it is a high-pitched piercing sound, but an expression of terror and pain. It is deadly-depressing because no one would thrust a hand to help, it is just lonely and helplessly echoing in the wild sky.

There are pairs of “sad and imploring eyes.” Every glance the mother gives to the baby is full of pain because she knows “he is not hers.” They are the mother’s imploring eyes, she begs a little bit more time to star at her baby. They wouldn’t let her. Every glance is saying hi, and goodbye. They are also the baby’s imploring eyes, he seeks his mother’s breasts and fond arms to hide, seeking mother’s caress and guidance to teach him how to survive in this world. But they wouldn’t let him.

So she “sadly clasped” her baby as a last try to protect him. He is the best gift to her sad life. ” A fountain gushing ever new, amid life’s desert wild.” The use of a metaphor yields a smart contrast which emphasizes the bond between the mother and her baby. The arrival of this newborn meant to the mother is what a fountain meant to the dead desert.

She fought, as a lonely solider. But she knew clearly what it meant to be as a slave mother. All she has left to the world is a baby that is not hers, and these bitter shrieks as the only means to tell the world her angers and agonies.

Notes from Underground Check-In Part 3: Book Mock Up

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We are very pleased to introduce you to our BAB group project, Notes from US, based on the Great Work we are reading throughout this semester, Notes from Underground.

 

 

Book Modeling Runway Show

Front:

Back:

Inner Cover Pages:

Pages:

Our body of work:

 

Detailed Outline

Content Materials
  • Introduction to our book, where you will gather all the information you need as a reader first get around to this decently sophisticated book. It will include intro part about the original book, Notes from Underground, the analysis that dissects Dostoyevsky’s ideology and his attitude towards prevailing philosophical theories in the eighteenth century, the themes lying in our book, and how we are going to expand out.
  • A few, extremely brief poems inspired by the Underground Man
  • Formulas, Drawings of the Underground Man and other scenes contained in the original book
  • Essay-like analyses, which include the nuances of the character’s thoughts that happened in a repetitive pattern, our interpretive conversations within ourselves answering questions like why is this NFU great, what makes NFU a great work. These analyses arrive as a result of the thinking process associated in the above sections.
Formal Details
  • We will hand write every single letter for the first sample of our book, then scan copy and print out pages for the rest of the 9 copies. The handwriting will mimic the style back in the eighteenth century.
  • We will glue the parchment-pattern paper and the oak tag paper together once we finish handwriting on the parchment-pattern paper as a way to make the parchment-pattern paper durable and amplify the old paper texture, which eventually helps elevate readers’ haptic experience during their interaction with our books.
  • We will bind the book by using the linen threads which will make our books come off as fuzzy, messy, and disorganized as if it visualizes the Underground Man’s personalities. The binding method will also create a sense of vintage through which our readers will be transferred back to the European society back in the eighteenth century.
  • Some hand drawings will also be added to our books as part of the content.
  • We will play with the order to make each book has a completely different layout but the same content. We treat each book as an individual and show our respect to each of them. The purpose of doing so is to make it lively and fun! More importantly, we want to show readers the order of content matters because those pick different books will harvest different reading experience. By doing so, we will also create a distinguishing persona for each book thus providing high-quality and phenomenal experience for readers.

 

Important Dates

5/9  Cover Decorations Done for 10 Copies

Finish glueing and making title decorations for each copy. Cut oak tag paper and ancient-looking paper to prepare for the next step.

5/10 Content and Drawing Draft

Mark will give us the black and white drawings he has worked on. Media will give us black paint he obtained from his super and also the draft introduction.

5/10 Meeting with Prof. Curseen for Feedback

If we can find a good time to meet that works for all of us, we can meet the professor for feedback on Wednesday.

5/12 Content and Drawing Finalization

Handwrite the words onto each ancient paper and photocopy these handwritten pages to be used for the other 9 copies.

5/12 Bookbinding

Finish binding all the layers of the book together.

5/17  Show Time!

 

What Really Matters?

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This comic tells a story about how the No-Face (a.k.a. Kaonashi) transforms himself from a socially isolated person into a popular star by effectively marketing himself on social medias but he still feels desolate. No-Face is a spirit in the famous Japanese animated film Spirited Away. He is a lonely spirit who begins to show emotions and compassion to other people after receiving a genuine care from Chihiro. Without too much knowledge about the society, No-Face learns by examples and adapts to his surroundings.

At the very beginning of this story, No-Face was still that lonely spirit, isolated by society, nobody cared. He was used to the life hiding behind the crowd and learned to be quite. He has always been needing attention and craves for someone who can truly understand him, however, facing people walking on the street with masks on and being indifferent to each other, he felt lost. No-Face wished to find love and care from the crowd, so he started to make the moves to blend in. No-Face learned by examples so he begins from becoming a smartphone user. He downloaded all the apps that are ranked the highest around his neighborhood and set up on all social media channels. He completed case studies about all the self-made YouTube star, people receives the most likes and followers on different channels. Then No-Face duplicated the model and started marketing himself on social medias. He gained more than enough exposures to the public and eventually became a self-made superstar. Regardless how famous and viral he becomes, he remains lonely and unhappy.

Resemble the underground man’s social isolation feature, No-Face is not accepted by the mainstream. In opposite to what the underground man’s reaction towards his self-isolation, NO-Face wants to step out of his comfort zones and seeks for the true love he is yearning for. Even though he was smart and tried hard on marketing himself and creating his self-image and finally he gained the attention that he was craving for, still he felt empty deep inside, because no one really knows who he is. So here lies some messages that I am trying to communicate with my readers through the slides: the quality of your social network is more important than the quantity. To start investing in the depth of your social life, people need to drag themselves away from the distracting screens that some of them are gluing onto day and night, peel off the filters the social apps make you comfortable using and seriously make the process of socialization personal and genuine.

Invisibility vs. Existence? The reasons behind his invisibility

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Ralph Ellison conveys an important message at the beginning of the prolog, from the fourth to the fifth paragraph, that the main character ‘invisible man’ does exist, but he is not visible. His invisibility is caused by people’s failures in identifying their own fallacies which made them not be able to acknowledge the invisible man’s existence.

This conclusion arrived after proving the invisible man’s existence and invisibility during a fight between him and a tall blond man. Ellison carefully hinted readers of the invisible man’s physical existence by describing his actions: “I bumped into”, “I sprang at him”, “seized”, “butted him again and again”, and “kicked him repeatedly” and so forth, which indeed caused the tall blond man “profusely bleeding”. But the invisible man all of a sudden gave upon his revenge when he already got out his knife and was almost about slit the white man’s throat. Why? The invisible man abruptly realized that the white man firmly believed that the invisible man does not at all exist, because the white man still refused to see the invisible man even he was beaten up to the point of death. When facing the threat of death, a rational man can still hold onto his belief must mean that he is deadly convinced by his belief, no matter if it is out of rationality. Just like people who devoted their lives to serve Nazi during WWII, even if the consequence of them holding onto their beliefs, later on, are proved to be catastrophic to the human race, they were unshakeable toward their convictions. There is no point in arguing with a person when he doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of the argument itself. What are you arguing about? Thereby, the invisible man developed a deep sense of shamaness and disgust—that he can change people’s mind. He even felt “amused” by his innocent fancies and the efforts of proving his visibility to people who do not recognize his existence in the first place. But the every fact proves that he does EXIST, it is not the invisible man himself, but the people who made him INVISIBLE. What a brilliant way to name the real criminals of the invisible violence.

What Did I Do To Be So Blue?

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Ralph Ellison’s first-person narrative in monologue form reveals the pains black people were suffering in American society over half a century ago.

When I finished absorbing the last sentence of this article, there was a voice ringing in my head as though hearing a sorrow tune in the distance… “What did I do to be so black and blue…” A deep sense of compassion overwhelmed me and I quickly flipped back to the first page and restart from the very beginning.
Ellison first introduces the main character in the first-person, who laments his invisibility to the white “sleep-walkers” of society. He tells a tale about how he almost killed a “sleep-walking” man on the street after the man blindly cursed him, even after being severely beaten. The narrator uses the metaphor of invisibility stating that this maltreatment towards black people is not because they are born invisible, it’s because they are born into a society that chooses not to see them.

As Ellison portrays in his work, what triggered this almost-murder is the insults the “tall blond man” shot at the invisible man. The white man was blind to the harm he did to the invisible man and kept cursing at him, although a simple solution would have been a sincere apology. Synonymous words to “invisible” repeatedly appeared in this passage, including the blind, unseen, and formless. These words emphasized the discrimination black people were subjected to and the extreme illness of a society at that point. Through the vivid depiction of the invisible man’s thoughts after the incident, readers finally understood the significance of “blue” in his sorrowful song. “I was both disgusted and ashamed. I was like a drunken man myself…Then I was amused.” Beating someone within an inch of his life and the yet absolute refusal of the sleepwalker to apologize hit the invisible man with a stark reality: “Would he have awakened at the point of death?” He would forever remain invisible.

The Mirror of The Adults

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” As the pure breath of children revives the life of aged men, so is our moral nature revived by their free and simple thoughts, their native feeling, their airy mirth, for little cause or none, their grief, soon roused and soon allayed. “

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sweet little tale took us on an interesting journey back to 19th century where a black-clad gentleman spent hours rambling with a five-year-old, whom this black-clad gentleman intimately addressed as Little Annie. They strolled through the sweet-shop, the toy shop, the bookstore, street by street, and they toured the circus where they’ve got to observe the same-self wolf, a hyena from Egypt, a bear of sentiment, two unsentimental monkeys that are called “queer little brutes”, and a “ridable” pony. Then they heard the town criers again, who announces that a little girl has strayed from home. The black-clad gentleman then realized his failure to inform little Annie’s mom that he was gonna take her on a ramble. On their way home, the black-clad gentleman reflected their journey and felt as if “after drinking from those fountains of still fresh existence”, which helped him “return to the world” and “do his part in life.”

Some vocabularies that repeatedly appeared in this text: weary, childhood, children, child, ramble, hand. Kept in mind these several words, I got to construct a picture in my head where there are only that black-clad gentleman who came off a little bizarre and the sinless little girl Annie with the purest spirit exist in the remote world. By stressing the youth, the purest heart of Annie and her motions and expressions, the contrast between the adult and the child becomes sharp, which appeared to be a little bit awkward to me at the beginning of his narrative. As their journey progressed, I imagined myself marching on with them side by side while they are wandering hand in hand. The inharmony between the two figures, Annie and the ‘creep’ adult who desperately craves for hanging out with a little girl, slowly disappeared. Then here lies, instead, a purely platonic relationship between the two beings, from which I perceive them as two spirits from the same body encountered when they are at different stages. The journey serves as a mirror that allows the adult to reunite with the old self with the same pure breath of little Annie.